Five tips for using social media

Social media is already well entrenched in businesses, with corporate blogs, Facebook pages and crowdsourcing projects underway. Anthony Plewes explains how - now that these tools are maturing - businesses can start getting real marketing results from social media.

Fuzzy social media benefits are all very well but for blogging, social networking, crowdsourcing and the like to become successful marketing tools, they will need to measure up against proven marketing metrics. Encouragingly some companies have already grasped that particular nettle, according to a recent social media benchmarking report from MarketingSherpa.

The research shows that seven per cent of companies are already producing measureable return on investment (ROI) on their social media projects, which is impressive given their relative newness. Unsurprisingly these businesses plan to invest in social media liberally. A further 49 per cent say social media is a promising tactic that will eventually produce ROI, so they also plan to invest in it further.

Where are these companies seeing success? Mainly in fairly obvious areas, such as increasing website traffic, lead generation and sales revenue, or improving search engine rankings and boosting brand or product reputation.

To really judge the success of a social media strategy, businesses also need to differentiate and segment their user base, because not all 'friends' or website visitors have the same value.

MarketingSherpa has also compared the effectiveness, effort required and enterprise usage of different social media activities. It found the most effective technique was building and maintaining blogger relationships, but because these required the most effort, usage in companies was only middling.

After maintaining relations, the next most effective social media strategies are microblogging - Twitter for example - social media SEO and blogging. Interestingly, budget for all of these social media strategies lies in human resources rather than IT.

For businesses looking to embrace social media for marketing in 2010, here are some pointers that can help make the project a success.

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